"Hurry up! Run!" Saber shouted behind them.
Turning back, the blonde woman glanced toward the mass of darkness spewing out of the false grail. She thrust out with her sword again slashing an extension of hideous black mud that had reached too close for her comfort and then she was running again, pushing Rin ahead of her until Shirou turned and snapped the tiny magus up into his arms.
Ahead of them, the red-cloaked image of Archer stood there gesturing toward the side. "Through that hedge, now!"
Shirou looked toward the wall of vegetation in question. It was thick, foreboding and full of thorns easily the size of small knives. He didn't particularly have time to stop and argue with the counter guardian he'd already faced in earnest combat. "Are you trying to kill us with tricks now?"
"Now trick, there is a path, you must simply look for it," Archer declared. "I'll hold off the Angra Mainyu."
"We'll just keep running along the hill until we're clear," Saber declared, glaring at Archer.
"It will catch up to you, I will have an easier time blocking a narrow gap than an entire field," Archer insisted.
"He's right," Rin snapped irritably and looked back down toward the onrushing abomination. "We have to get clear and find a way to fix this thing...Saber into the hedge!"
Saber glared again at Archer before turning quickly toward the wall of thorns, "If you insist, Rin." She lashed out with Excalibur and curiously found the thorns resistant to her weapon, cutting open only a very narrow path, through which she gestured for Rin and Shirou to pass through.
"It'll be quicker if I walk for myself," Rin insisted, pushing herself out of Shirou's arms before shrugging through the gap that Saber had opened. She bit her lip as the thorns dug into her skin while she tried to get past the hedge to the other side. There was just more hedge though. She started to slow up, getting stuck when Shirou moved ahead of her, blade in hand as he started to cut a path for her to follow through.
"How thick is this thing?" Shirou asked as he continued through, thorns cutting at him again and again. It was as if the Hedge didn't want him to leave somehow, and the strangest images seemed to move through his mind over and over again. Images of himself as a child speaking to people he didn't remember came into mind alongside those of his real life. Other images came to him of an image in the mirror of a tall, wiry man with hair of bloody copper and nails of tinted steel. And then there were the endless images of battle and bloodshed that must have been from Archer's memories. Yet, he found himself fighting beside Saber...or something that might have been her heroic spirit no longer bounded by human form...and often Rin. Almost immediately after each of these images, they passed and he was back hacking through the Hedge.
Behind, him Rin similar kept having flashes of her life. Time spent in school, with her parents and it was all wrong. There was no magic, no monsters, things that didn't match with what she knew her life to be. The images that assaulted her just seemed so...ordinary. But then there were others, memories of a near parade of sexual encounters, mostly with Shirou or Saber or her...not-sister? And others? But that wasn't right, she'd been a virgin until recently...hadn't she? And when she really thought about, they...they didn't look like the people she knew...they looked inhuman, almost monstrous. A glimmering lady with draconic fingers and eye ridges, a narrow vicious looking protector...and others. Then she caught glimpses of the reflection of a young woman of sensual, alien beauty and glimmering beautiful grey-dark skin. But then the images flashed away and reality returned.
At the back, Saber likewise felt flashes of strange images pushing through her, war and battle images like those that came into Shirou's mind. Most of the time she was fighting with Shirou and Rin, sometimes against them. Only they were monsters or demons hiding under the appearances of her Masters...lovers...and she'd loved them many times and Rider as well...no those were the fake memories. They had to be faked. Just like the memories of a small town on the edge of a vast desert. Somewhere she'd been with her...father...no, that couldn't be right. She'd never met her father. Her father certainly wasn't some fellow in a red-coat. She shook her head and fought her way through them to come back to what she knew.
Finally, the hedge gave way to sparkling daylight...that was wrong wasn't it. They couldn't have been pulling through that hedge long enough for it to be daylight, could they?
"That is not Fuyuki City," Saber declared as they looked down the hill they were on into the city below.
Shirou and Rin looked toward her at the sound of the voice and instantly flinched. Standing there wasn't the Saber they knew, oh, they could see hints of it, like a flimsy mask, but instead, what they saw was a regal woman with reptilian eyes and traceries of scales over her neck and replacing the hair of eyebrows.
"Oh my god!" Rin gasped, her voice seeming to catch a vague, eerie echo as she spoke. "Is that...really you?"
"What the hell is going on here, you're...you're like from the..." Shirou started to say.
"The visions," Saber responded, shakily as she tried to deny the evidence of her senses. "The both of you as well."
If this was the truth...then...then were those other visions also truth? She was Arturia Pendragon. Wasn't she? That little girl on the edge of the desert wasn't the truth. She couldn't be.
"We can't go into the city...not looking like this," Rin commented, looking down at her body, literally made for carnal sin. "We'll be shot on sight. Where's the flood from the grail?"
"No where," spoke the wiry young man with metal finger nails and coils of copper hail that was Shirou. "I can't even find the hedge we came out of."
"None of this makes sense," Rin noted. "No sense at all."
"Hold," Saber whispered. "Something's coming."
She brought her sword into line, feeling some reassurance at the feel of it in her hand. Rin and Shirou also readied themselves as well. She didn't know whether they felt stronger or she felt weaker, but somehow she felt that she could trust their presence in a fight more than before. As if they had somehow become more...equal.
"Who's there?" Shirou asked, looking out into the shadows under the trees where the glitter of eyes seemed to rise up into the air as they stepped out into the light.
"That should be our question," the sleek, predatorial seeming man stepping forward said. "This place stinks of spirits and I find three strange people standing on the edge of our territory." He was flanked by four other individuals, including two women, all with similarly primal looks to their pose and manner. Saber felt, strangely, that she could almost smell a wolf on them.
"What are they?" one of the women asked. "Not bloodsuckers."
Rin huffed as if insulted. "Are you calling me a Dead Apostle? I'll have you know, that may family has long acted to eradicate the vile demons."
"Clearly, standing in the light of day takes you out of that category," the clear leader noted. "Dead Apostle, I like that. Good description for some of those self-important corpses." He looked back towards his friends then.
"They smell of raw magic," one of the men said. "Not a golem either, the land isn't dying around them. I'd say they were one of Jabber's people."
There was a knowing nod then as the leader turned to face Shirou, Rin and Saber. "You're in luck. We've got an agreement with your folk, Yoshiko will drive down into to town and Jabberjaw will explain things to you." He jabbed a thumb back toward the woman that had spoken up first.
"Jabberjaw?" Shirou repeated, getting amused looks from the men and women in front of them.
"You'll see when you meet him," was the only answer.
It turned out that Yoshiko had a truck near by and she was currently driving them down into the town below that seemed set between mountains and hills.
"I'd stow the talk about eradicating vampires when you get into town," she said.
"Why's that?" Rin asked.
"Cause we've got a truce right now," Yoshiko noted.
"You...you can't truce with vampires," Rin protested.
"Pfft, most vampires are so cowardly they'll jump at a truce and pretend its them being merciful," the girl noted. "But everyone in town is in truce right now."
"Is that an unusual situation?" Saber asked.
"Usually, we just each keep to our own places," the girl noted. "But things have been getting weird lately. We've had people going missing. Sounds like everyone has. Lots of spirit activity too...keeps us busy. Til we figure it out, the entire city is neutral ground, us, vamps, hunters...everybody. Just in case someone gets driven into someone else's territory."
"Aren't we going to cause a stir?" Shirou asked. "I mean...the way we look?"
"Why, what do you look like?" Yoshiko asked.
"You mean you can't tell?" Saber asked from the seat behind the woman.
"You smell...different, but I'm rahu, that's a warrior in case you don't know," she explained. "I can't see the real you. I see..." she glanced over her shoulder. "...a kinda spindly red-haired Japanese guy. A damn sexy chick with black lipstick and a far too serious looking white girl with a sword...where'd that go by the way? And I smell you three have a mutual appreciation society going with occasional extra players. But other than that..." she shrugged.
The three teens, or at least apparent teens, blushed heavily as the woman snickered and looked back to the road.
Rin reached to her mouth. "I have black lipstick?!"
"You have black lips," Saber corrected flushing deeper as she remembered kissing those lips in a flash, and being explored by those lips.
"Oh..." Rin noted, uncertain how to take that.
Eventually, they stopped in front of what looked like a rundown tenement and Yoshiko stepped out of the truck. "Here we are, wait a bit."
"Have you ever heard that term before?" Shirou asked Rin. "Rahu"
"No," Rin responded. "It isn't familiar."
"I don't think they're human," Saber noted warningly. She tapped Rin's shoulder and pointed out of the window as Yoshiko walked forward unconcerned as a massive, hairy figure loped out of a door and stepped forward to meet her. He stood more than a foot and a half over her, and yet seemed to regard her with an incredible amount of caution.
A moment later she waved them to come out of the truck.
"Let's be careful, we don't know what we're getting into," Rin whispered.
"...are you sure?" the giant was saying. "We haven't had any new escapees come here for a year."
"Take a look and tell me, Takahito says they're you're people, and you gotta trust the pack theurge," the woman explained with a shrug.
"Are you Jabberjaw?" Rin asked.
"Nah, I'm K...k..Kenta," the giant stuttered as he caught sight of the two girls. "J...J..."
"Stop!" Saber snapped irritably. "Calm down. Now, breathe and continue with what you were saying."
"Jabberjaw's inside," he said slowly.
"You've had to do that before," Shirou accused.
Saber's stoic countenance didn't shift, but there was an aura of smugness that assured Shirou his guess was correct.
"You've got this, then?" Yoshiko asked, "I'm heading back up. We've got a hunt to run tonight."
"Should you be traveling alone if there is danger?" Rin asked.
Yoshiko smirked and got into the truck.
"She'll be fine," the giant noted watching her go cautiously.
"Is she that great a warrior?" Saber asked.
"She's a wolf, always best not to tangle with them if you don't have to," he explained. "The sooner she learns the same goes for ogres, the better, though."
They stepped down out of the street and moved further into the confines of the building. They saw a number of people staying in the rooms as they passed, all of them inhuman to some degree or another, but in a huge variety. "Did you just get out of the Hedge or something?"
"We came out of a hedge yeah," Shirou admitted. "How'd you know about that?"
They moved into a large room that had been formed by knocking out the walls of several apartments forming a sort of court. "Not a hedge. The Hedge. Everyone has to pass through the Hedge to escape the Faerie."
The speaker was a tall, slender creature that looked something like a mako shark turned into a human being. There was a raw sort of primal appeal to the creature, even as unlikely and strange as he seemed.
"The Fae?" Saber asked.
"That's ridiculous, the Fae don't let humans into their realms. They're afraid of us corrupting it!" Rin protested.
The sharkman smiled a wide, toothy grin. "So you were fed lies during your durance then? That's not novel. The Others like bringing humans in, you see. Pieces in their games, servants in their halls, pets, lovers when they want to try that out..."
"What are you saying?" Shirou asked hesitantly.
"You've started to guess it yourself," the shark noted, pointing to his nose. "Maybe your human memories are returning? You're starting to wonder if what you've only known is lie or not."
He paused.
"It is," he affirmed. "Welcome to the Fukushima courts. You're just in time for a siege."
Probably not going anywhere with this.
Essential point: All of Nasuverse is a realm kept by one or more of the Others. Which means Saber, Rin and Shirou have been operating on rules created by the whim of an insane, ultimately alien thing that makes Cthulhu seem mundane.
All three are dual kiths.
Saber and Rin are both Fairest. Shirou is Wizened (though tall rather than short)
Saber is Draconic/Gandharva. The Gandharva bonus basically allows them to be super charismatic. Instead of the normal Draconic bonus to Brawl, she has a bonus to Weaponry.
Rin is a Succubus/Shadowsoul. So bonuses on social rolls when the person she's dealing with shares her Vice (Pride...which would have some calling her a substandard succubus, succubi with a Lust vice get bigger bonuses) and has free "Striking Looks". And Shadowsoul lets her get bonuses on intimidate, subterfuge and learn darkness powers easier.
Shirou is a Smith/Soldier. Basically, can improve metal tools and always has bonuses to using blades. If he improves the same metal tool more than three times, he destroys it.
Like I said, I'm fine if someone takes this and runs with it, but I have other projects that I have to get to that involve being paid.
The sad truth is that New World of Darkness is less of crapsack world than Nasuverse...heck, I think Old World of Darkness is less of a crapsack world...at least in that setting, there is a promise of the world coming back to life and reaching a state of a golden age again eventually, due to the whole cycle of ages.